In an episode of Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide titled “School Newspaper,” the trio of Ned, Cookie, and Moze join the schools newspaper. At first neither one of the three best friends want to be there, but soon get interested once they start investigating. After doing some intense digging, they discover that there is twenty thousand dollars missing from the James K. Polk Middle School’s maintenance budget. The missing money is very crucial to the schools development. The ceiling tile is falling on student’s heads which are causing concussions, the lockers are worn down, and the walls need to be repainted. The trio goes and investigates that the person stealing the schools money is no other than the guy in charge that was supposed …show more content…
The perpetrator had no intentions on stealing from the more private school right around the block, even though there was more money in the private school. He knew that people would not care as much if money was stolen from a public minority school. It is sad to think that a fictional middle school will not get the same amount of equality as opposed to a respected private school. Government funded schools are in a way like the burglars that always fall short and never get a chance to steal the diamond and achieve their goal. In my opinion, I believe that the only way that schools will ever stand a chance at providing equality would be if they government shut down every entire private school. It has had a deep impact on authors such as Kozol’s, Tatum’s, and even Ravitch’s who have all put their thought in their essays on how the private schools do stand superior compared to regular schools. Private schools provide so many advantages that belittle minority …show more content…
No one is judged based on where they come from, the only thing that matters is your grades and test scores. They should speak volumes for itself and help you succeed. There isn’t a gap that is created by having a fancy school on your transcript. Having a private school on your transcripts creates like an italic and bold font to that person which stands out among a regular person with an ordinary font. Destroying all those that foster an unequal playing field is a huge disadvantage to those who can’t afford. Some would say that those who attend private schools are nothing more than flashy wealthy people trying to prove that their kid is better than local minority inner city school kids, but there shouldn’t be a price tag on education when it’s provided free by the
What racial, social, and economic characteristics of the community and school district are relevant to the problem described in the case?
Another school in the same district is located “in a former roller-skating rink” with a “lack of windows” an a scarcity of textbooks and counselors. The ratio of children to counselors is 930 to one. For 1,300 children, of which “90 percent [are] black and Hispanic” and “10 percent are Asian, white, or Middle Eastern”, the school only has 26 computers. Another school in the district, its principal relates, “‘was built to hold one thousand students’” but has “‘1,550.’” This school is also shockingly nonwhite where “’29 percent '” of students are “‘black [and] 70 percent [are]
Savage Inequalities, written by Jonathan Kozol, shows his two-year investigation into the neighborhoods and schools of the privileged and disadvantaged. Kozol shows disparities in educational expenditures between suburban and urban schools. He also shows how this matter affects children that have few or no books at all and are located in bad neighborhoods. You can draw conclusions about the urban schools in comparison to the suburban ones and it would be completely correct. The differences between a quality education and different races are analyzed. Kozol even goes as far as suggesting that suburban schools have better use for their money because the children's futures are more secure in a suburban setting. He thinks that each child should receive as much as they need in order to be equal with everyone else. If children in Detroit have greater needs than a student in Ann Arbor, then the students in Detroit should receive a greater amount of money.
The mentality of the school was to help the popular kids succeed. Joe had fallen through the cracks for 2 years and kept trying to reach out for help but was ignored. As I examine his circumstances I wonder how things could have been different. If he had stayed on the football team, would he had received the help he needed or would the teachers just of given his good grades to keep playing? I believe the former is more likely. The teacher-students relationships were inappropriate and negative for the students. The students were not measured on their learning merit but on their popularity. The sad reality is the failure of the education system that forced a child with a learning disability to repeat the same grade almost 3 times. The teachers have the responsibility to develop their students into success individuals even if the students are disabled.
The gap between the nation’s best and worst public schools continues to grow. Our country is based on freedom and equality for all, yet in practice and in the spectrum of education this is rarely the case. We do not even have to step further than our own city and its public school system, which many media outlets have labeled “dysfunctional” and “in shambles.” At the same time, Montgomery County, located just northwest of the District in suburban Maryland, stands as one of the top school systems in the country. Within each of these systems, there are schools that excel and there are schools that consistently measure below average. Money alone can not erase this gap. While increased spending may help, the real problem is often rooted in the complex issues of social, cultural, and economic differences. When combined with factors involving the school itself and the institution that supports it, we arrive at what has been widely known as the divide between the suburban and urban schools. Can anything actually be done to reverse this apparent trend of inequality or are the outside factors too powerful to change?
America’s school system and student population remains segregated, by race and class. The inequalities that exist in schools today result from more than just poorly managed schools; they reflect the racial and socioeconomic inequities of society as a whole. Most of the problems of schools boil down to either racism in and outside the school or financial disparity between wealthy and poor school districts. Because schools receive funding through local property taxes, low-income communities start at an economic disadvantage. Less funding means fewer resources, lower quality instruction and curricula, and little to no community involvement. Even when low-income schools manage to find adequate funding, the money doesn’t solve all the school’s problems. Most important, money cannot influence student, parent, teacher, and administrator perceptions of class and race. Nor can money improve test scores and make education relevant and practical in the lives of minority students.
In Jonathan Kozol’s essay titled, “From Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid,” Kozol touches on how racial segregation has not disappeared in big cities’ urban public school systems. In this essay we can see how both types of judgements; racial and academic come together to form a stereotype about intellectual success in our current educational system. On the other hand, he brings to our attention that it is the American citizen’s common belief that racial segregation in public schools doesn’t exist anymore. In Kozol’s work he discusses various schools in major cities he has visited and offers the reader personal anecdotes from interviews with students. One quote from a student that I found remarkably interesting is “we do not have the things you have. You have clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks. You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing. Can you help us?” (Kozol). This little girl is begging and reaching out to a white man because she thinks that he can help her. I am curious as to why she thinks that white schools have more than children at her school and if this is from first hand experience or from hearing from others. Does she think this way because her school demographics are composed mostly of one race? More importantly, I hope that someone did not teach her to think that
Poorer schools with more diverse populations have poor educational programs. Teachers methodically drone out outdated curriculum on timetables set by standards set by the state. Students are not engaged or encouraged to be creative thinkers. They are often not even given handouts or physical elements of education to touch or feel or engage them into really connecting to the material being presented by the teacher in front of them. Time is not wasted exploring any of the subjects in a meaningful way. As much of the curriculum is gone through as the teacher can get through given the restriction of having a classroom of students that are not picking it up adequately enough according to standardized tests scores. So time is spent re-droning the material to them and re-testing before the cycle repeats in this classroom and other subject classrooms in these types of school. This education is free. As John Gatto writes about in his book, “Against School”, it seems as if the vast majority of students are being taught be blue collared, low paid but obedient citizens. As she makes her way up to less diverse, more likely private and expensive schools, the education becomes better. Students are engaged by teachers that seem to like to teach. Students are encouraged to be
Mary Mebane used her own experience on the bus to show how segregation affected her life. Mary Mebane points out, white people “could sit anywhere they choose, even in the colored section. Only the black passengers had to obey segregation laws.” When Mebane was young, she saw a conflict on the bus. The driver asked a black person who sat in the ‘no-man’s-land’ to move back to colored section to give the seat for the white person who was standing on the bus because the bus was full. Segregation on the bus represented how white people unequally treat black people. When black people refused this driver to move, the driver try to send them to police. Black people were living in the shadow of racism and segregation at that time. However, that situation still affects school system and community now. Mebane asserts, “It was a world without option.” Black people have lower economic and social status because they are restricted to a small box because of segregation. “In Six Decades After Brown Ruling, in US Schools Still Segregated”, Dexter Mullins claims that in some schools like Valley West Elementary School in Houston, about 90% of people are not white people. These kinds of schools do not have enough funds to support adequate school resource to these students, and these students have lower opportunities to contact with cultural diversity. Both reasons negatively impact on the
To begin with, they do not consider their ghetto, barrio, or reservation schools "better" because they do not have the "back home" [culture] educational situation. In-stead, they think that their schools are "worse" because they are not like white schools in the suburbs. They see no justifiable reason for the inferior education--except discrimination(Ogbu & Simons,
Income inequality in the United States is directly correlated with education decline over the past 40 years. People with lower incomes tend to have less opportunities for a good education than those with higher incomes. American education, when compared to other nations, has dropped dramatically due largely to a rise in income inequality since the 1970s. Not only has economic inequality lead to academic decline and disparity, but academic disparity has also tended to lead to further economic inequality. Because of this, improving the American education system can effectively decrease the income gap. If done correctly, the usage of an alternative school model, specifically the private school model, rather than the usual public school model can reduce economic inequality.
The class divide between those who attend private schools and those who attend public schools is evident, especially when looking at large heavily populated cities. Private schools are not government funded and so they rely on the donations and tuition from students and benefactors, which means that many private schools receive more money than public schools - which can be used to further the education of the students. At this time in America public schools are being constantly defunded and so, parents and students are desperate to be a part of the private school education, which relates to Marx’s statement that “The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population.” Private schools can be rather expensive
This should be independent of one’s parents’ education. This issue is more pervasive and destructive than many think. It could also be said that “Today, the proficiency gap between the poor and the rich is nearly twice as large as that between black and white children” (Porter). The education of African-Americans before desegregation, and even in some cases after, was so inferior to what was received by white students. If the poor are two times further behind in education than the African-americans were, then this issue is extremely discriminatory and something that must be reconciled as soon as possible. This piece of evidence really struck a chord with me because it related today’s education system to something that was an atrocity and received ample backlash. It really put into perspective the extent to which there is an education breach, and how instead of black vs. white, it is now rich vs. poor. The education that disadvantaged children receive is so lacking, that, “Even the best performers from disadvantaged backgrounds, who enter kindergarten reading as well as the smartest rich kids, fall behind over the course of their schooling” (Porter). The U.S. education system is blatantly failing to serve the children from a disadvantaged background. They can come in with an advantage over the rich,
Their zoned school was primarily low-income and hispanic, they noticed that the population of white students enrolled elsewhere-- contrary to their zone school assignments. The school had a Spanish dual-language program and had small class sizes, both of which interested the two parents, but there were many options open to them. Ultimately, they too chose to go to a different school-- Manhattan School for Children. “While most of the students in District 3 are black or Hispanic, nearly two-thirds of the students at Manhattan School for Children are white.” (The New York Times) Elana and Adam were conscious of the race disparity in the district, the parents considered their zone school to help combat this to some degree-- their children would still benefit-- but they still chose to enroll their child in the predominantly white
Class Size is another issue. In private schools there’s usually smaller classes, so students are getting more attention. This makes it better for the students because if they need help, then it’s easier to get help from the teachers and to be more focused because of less noise and easier for teachers to control their classrooms.